LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No.. 



Shelf. 



^m. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



"\ 




a 

< 

o 

•-3 



THE 

STORY OF JONAH: 



WITH AN ACCOUNT OF 



THE SWALLOWING BY SEA MONSTERS 
OF MEN AND QUADRUPEDS 



AND THE 



TESTIMONY OF SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY 



AND OF THE 



NINE VI TE MONUMENTS 



REALITY OF THE OCCURRENCES 

DESCRIBED IN THE 

BOOK OF JONAH 



j 

EDITED BY / 

GEORGE J. VARNEY 



jun s»y * v«^' 



BOSTON O/'. 



THE CHRISTIAN WITNESS COMPANY 
1897 



.v 3 



Copyright, 1897, 
By The Christian Witness Company. 



C. J. Peters & Son, Typographers, Boston. 



Skinner, Bartlett, & Co., Printers. 



PREFACE. 



Aisr eminent clergyman said, not long ago, in a public 
address, "The Book of Jonah is only a picture with a 
beautiful lesson." 

It has indeed a lesson, " beautiful " to all persons of 
benevolent disposition; but if the book be regarded as 
merely a literary invention of some ancient scribe, semi- 
civilized and of limited knowledge, designed to inculcate 
religious doctrines that were somewhat peculiar in his 
pe-riod, it will lack the requisite authority. Consequently 
it would have little or no force with many persons more 
or less conversant with the Bible, w r ho entertain various 
opinions in regard to the correctness of its teachings, and 
hold it no more in regard than they do some other litera- 
ture which has never been reckoned among sacred writings. 
If, on the other hand, the book is historically true, if it be 
the record of real occurrences, than it presents vividly an 
unusually intelligible passage in the course of the divine 
government of the world, and does indeed possess author- 
ity, and will have an influence far beyond what is possible 

3 



4 PREFACE. 

to a nature- myth, an allegory, or a fable. When accepted 
as genuine history, it cannot fail of being heeded by all 
intelligent people; since back of it will be apprehended, in 
a larger degree, the power and will of the Almighty. 

The Lord Jesus took the events in Jewish history as 
they were understood by the Jews of his day, — a method 
which best served for the inculcation of the truth he had 
to communicate. As to the story of Jonah, he gave it, as 
a whole, his implied sanction at least. 

The belief of the compiler of this volume is that the 
action in that story was real, and, consequently, providen- 
tial ; and that its record was divinely inspired. 

An excellent statement of the proper intellectual atti- 
tude toward the biblical records in their relation to the 
dictum of science is reported to have been made recently 
by Rev. Lyman Abbott, as follows : — 

" In my judgment our hypotheses must always be con- 
formed to the attested facts ; we must not determine 
whether we will accept the evidence as to facts by consid- 
ering whether they agree with our preconceived hypotheses. 
If I were convinced, for instance, that the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ is not consistent with the doctrine of evolu- 
tion, I should be compelled to abandon or modify that 
doctrine; I should not abandon my belief in the resurrec- 
tion. That resurrection I regard as a fact ; evolution as 
a theory — on the whole, the best theory of ' God's way 



PREFACE. 5 

of doing things' yet proposed by philosophic thinkers 
— the latest word and the best word of science, but not 
necessarily its last or final word." 

In the Introduction of this volume I have chiefly cited 
the early theologians and commentators, because they first 
stated the theories which the doctors of the present period* 
have set forth with little or no modification. 

As my purpose in offering a contribution to the discus- 
sion on the subject of this book is the establishment of 
the truth, it has appeared to me that I should furnish the 
best material possible, without showing partiality to my 
own utterances ; accordingly, finding two such articles 
available, I have given them, and also several brief ex- 
tracts from other writers, what appear to be their suitable 
positions in this volume. 

Boston, May 1, 1897. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 
introduction.* page 

Identification of the PpvOphet 13 

Period of Composition 15 

Jonah in Nineveh . 17 

Testimony of the Ninevite Monuments 18 

PART II. 

A Study of Jonah 25 

By the late Charles Reade, D.C.L. 

PART III. 
The Book of Jonah 47 

PART IY. 

Jonah and the Sea-Monster 59 

By George J. Yarney. 

PART Y. 

Jonah in Nineveh 83 

By H. Clay Trumbull, D.D. 



7 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites Frontispiece 

{From CasseWs Illustrated Family Bible, London.) 

PAGE 

Map of Ciialdea and Nineveh 16 

Sculptured Wale at Kouyunjik 19 

Excavated by M. Botta, 1842, 1843. (Front Bonomi's "Nineveh and 

Its Palaces.") 

Jonah Cast into the Sea 29 

(From CasseWs Illustrated Family Bible.) 

Angle of Palace Court, Khorsap,ad 46 

Exhumed by M. Botta. (From Fergusson's " The Palaces of Nine- 
veh and Persepolis.") 

Jonah Sitting in His Booth 55 

(From CasseWs Illustrated Family Bible.) 

The Humpback Whale 64 

A Sperm Whale Fighting His Captops ...... 66 

(From " Observations on the Sperm Whale," etc., by Thomas Beale, 

London.) 

A Sperm Whale Feeding . 72 

Sur-Detties of the Chaldeans 88 

Copy of intar/lio exhumed at Nineveh. (From Maspero's " Dawn of 
Civilization" Paris, 1895.) 

9 



10 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGE 

Broken Figure of Man-fish 87 

From Ninevite Seal. (Maspero.) 

The "Dagon" of Scripture 88 

{One of a group, of which the walls of the Palace of Khorsabad had an 
extensive series. (Bonomi.) 

Two Man-fish Priests 91 

Occupying a middle section of a bronze plaque from an Assyrian 
excavation. (Maspero.) 

A God-fish. (Oannes) 93 

From an Assyrian bas-relief (Maspero.) 






PART I. 
INTRODUCTION. 



INTRODUCTION. 



IDENTIFICATION OF THE PROPHET. 

" The Prophet Jonah," says Dr. Pusey,* " who was at 
once the author and, in part, the subject of the book that 
bears his name, is beyond question the same who is re- 
lated in the Book of Kings to have been God's messenger 
of comfort to Israel in the reign of Jeroboam II. f For 
his own name (in English, Dove), as well as that of his 
father, Amittai (The Truth of God), occurs nowhere else 
in the Old Testament; and it is wholly improbable that 
there should have been two prophets of the same name, 
sons of fathers by the same name, when the names of 
both son and father were so rare as not to occur elsewhere 
in the Old Testament. The place which the prophet occu- 
pies among the twelve agrees therewith. For Hosea and 
Amos (prophets who are known to have prophesied in the 
time of Jeroboam and Joel, who prophesied before Amos) 

* The late Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D., Regius Professor of Hebrew, and 
canon of Christ Church, Oxford, England, 
t 2 Kings xiv. 25. 

13 



14 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

are placed before him ; Micah (who prophesied after the 
death of Jeroboam and Uzziah) is placed after him. 



" He (Jonah) was then a prophet of Israel, born at 
Gath-hepher, a small village of Zebnlon, which lies, St. 
Jerome says, i two miles from Sepphorim, which is now 
called Diocaesarea, in the way to Tiberias, where his tomb 
is also pointed out.' His tomb was still shown in the hills 
near Sepphorim in the twelfth century, as Benjamin of 
Tudela relates. At the same place, ' on a rocky hill two 
miles east of Sepphuriah/ is still pointed out the tomb of 
the Prophet, and 6 Moslems and the Christians of Nazareth 
alike regard the village (el Meshhad) as his native village. 
The tomb is even now venerated by the Moslem inhabi- 
tants." * 

Some hold (among them Dr. Pusey) that the Book oi 
Jonah may have been the work of the Prophet himself, 
writing in the third person, as did certain others of the 

* Various spots have been pointed out on surmise as the place of 
Jonah's sepulture, such as Gath-hepher in Palestine, and the Mound 
of Nebbi Yunas (in the southern section of Nineveh, and within the 
walls), on which are the ruins of an early Christian church, which 
has beeD sketched by enthusiastic dilettante archaeologists to serve as the 
tomb of the Prophet ; while the so-called Epiphanius speaks of Jonah's 
retiring to Tyre, and being buried there in the tomb of Ceneza>us, judge 
of Israel. This author has a life of Jonah, — " De Vitis Prophet." 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

prophets at times, — observable in their books. < The theo- 
ries of most of the authorities (next following) preclude 
the composition of the book by the prophet whose experi- 
ence it relates. 

PERIOD OF COMPOSITION. 

Gesenius and Ewald placed the composition of the Book 
of Jonah at a time when prophecy had long ceased ; Ewald 
(partly on account of its miracles) putting it in the fifth 
century b.c. ; and Hitzig, with his wonted wilfulness and 
insulatedness of criticism, builds a theory that the book 
is of Egyptian origin, — on his own mistake that the 
kikaion (this gourd) grew only in Egypt, — and placed it 
in the second century b.c, the time of the Maccabees. 
The interval between these periods is also filled up. One 
commentator (Goldhorn) places the Book of Jonah in the 
time of Sennacherib, that is, contemporaneous with Heze- 
kiah ; another (Rosenmuller) under Josiah ; another (De 
Wette) before the Captivity, after the destruction of Nin- 
eveh by Cyaxares ; a seventh (Bertholdt) lays chief stress 
on the argument that the destruction of Nineveh is not 
mentioned in it ; an eighth (Jahn) prefers the period after 
the return from the Captivity to its close ; a ninth 
(Maurer) doubted not, from its argument and purpose, 
that it was written before the order of prophets ceased ; 
while others (among whom are Gesenius and Ewald) of the 




MAP OF 

CHALDEA 

AND 

*N1NEVEH« 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

same school are as positive from its arguments and con- 
tents that it must have been written after that order was 
closed.* 

JONAH IN NINEVEH. 

" This is perhaps . . . the explanation how (seeing its 
circumference was three days' journey) Jonah entered <a 
day's journey ' in the city, and at the close of the period 
we find him at the east side of the city, the opposite to 
that at which he had entered. 

" His preaching seems to have lasted only this one 
day. He went, we are told, one day's journey into the 
city. The one hundred and fifty stadia — nearly nineteen 
miles (which is the measure from side to side of Nin- 
eveh and its environs) — - conforms nearly to the ancient 
Jewish reckoning of a day's journey ; so that Jonah 
walked through from end to end, repeating that one cry 
which God had commanded him. We seem to see the 
solitary figure of the Prophet, clothed in that one rough 
garment of hair-cloth, uttering that cry which we almost 
hear, echoing in street after street, l Od arbaim youm ve- 
nineveh nejydcheth ' (Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be 
overthrown). The words which the story declares him 
to have cried belong to that day only. For on that one 

* Dr. Pusey: "Introduction to the Book of Jonah." 



18 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

day only was there still a respite of forty days. In one 
day the grace of God prevailed !" * 

In support of the statement of this astounding result, 
the mythology (or religion) of the Ninevites becomes a 
subject of much interest.! 

Many of us have wondered what the prophet did on 
the other thirty-nine days ; people have imagined the 
prophet preaching as moderns would, or telling them his 
own wondrous story of his desertion of God, his mirac- 
ulous punishment, and, on his repentance, his miraculous 
deliverance. In Jonah's story there is nothing of this. 
The one point brought out is the conversion of the Nin- 
evites. This he dwells on in circumstantial details. 

TESTIMONY OF THE NINBVITE MONUMENTS. 

As with the story of Jonah at the present time, so 
was it with parts of the Prophet Isaiah until the period 
since the explorations in Assyria, and the excavation of 
the ruins of its ancient cities. 

The tenth chapter of Isaiah has always been difficult 
to understand. Commentators were actually reduced to 
the extremity of supposing the graphic and lifelike ac- 
count in this chapter as at least an ideal one. Sceptical 

* Dr. l'usey. 

* See dosing article in this book respecting investigations of Ninevite 
ruins. 



INTRODUCTION. 



19 




Sculptured Wall at Kouyunjik. 



20 THE STOKY OF JONAH. 

criticism stigmatized it as a history of events that never 
happened. Professor Sayce # has pointed out that the 
record on the Ninevite monuments of his campaign in 
the conquest of Judea, chiselled in the stone under the 
direction of the conqueror himself, the mighty Sargon 
(the father of Sennacherib, King of Assyria), makes clear 
certain of the prophecies of Isaiah, this tenth chapter 
especially. 

On the banks of the Tigris in Assyria (Sargon's au- 
gust home) have lain for twenty-four centuries several 
large mounds, the heaped ruins of ancient cities. On 
this river, at the modern village of Kouyunjik, near Mo- 
sul, are the ruins of Nineveh, which have been carefully 
explored by Sir Austin Henry Layard. A little farther 
to the north, near the modern Khorsabad, is the site of 
the city of Sargon. The explorations were begun here 
by M. Botta, and were followed by those of M. Place 
(1851), assisted by M. Felix Thomas; and they have re- 
sulted in a complete success. Other explorations have 
since been prosecuted at this place and in Mesopotamia, 
by Ilawlinson, Russam, Loftus, and George Smith. So 
vast is the number of the inscribed tablets and cylinders 
unearthed that many remained long unread, not from 
their being undecipherable or unintelligible, but because 

* A. H. Sayce, professor of Assyriology, University of Oxford, Eng- 
land. 






INTRODUCTION. 21 

of insufficient time for the few Assyrian scholars to per- 
form this work. Their contents have been largely given 
to us recently by Professor Sayce. 

These researches have measurably established the real- 
ity of the events described by Isaiah, and the accuracy of 
his prophecy ; and they have also furnished reasonable 
grounds of belief in the reality of the account of Jonah's 
preaching and its surprising effect, as described in the 
book bearing his name.* 

* For the discoveries having direct relation to Jonah, see the final 
article, Part V., " Jonah in Nineveh.'' 



PART II. 
A STUDY OF JONAH. 



A STUDY OF JONAH.* 



Jonah, the son of Amittai, figures amongst the prophet- 
ical writers, but he was not one ; he was only a seer, 
like Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, the prophet that came out 
of Judah, and many others. Like them his inspiration 
was occasional, but taught him something of the mind 
of God (Jonah iv. 1). His other predictions are lost for 
want of a chronicler ; but a master-hand has recorded his 
great prophecy, and tire strange events that preceded and 
followed it. This little Hebrew seer suddenly received 
a grand and startling commission, — to go to the banks of 
the Tigris, and threaten the largest, oldest, and wickedest 
city in the world with speedy destruction for its sins. 
That still, small voice, which no mortal ear had ever de- 
fied, thrilled Jonah's ear, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that 
great city, and cry against it ; for their wickedness is 
come up before me," 

* By the late Charles Reade, D.C.L., English novelist and moralist. 
The article was first published in Good Words, London, vol. xxix., pp. 
478-483. 

25 



26 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

Here was an honor for a petty seer. His betters would 
have received it with pious exultation. Samuel or Na- 
than, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, or Paul, would 
have risen like lions, and gone forth with strong faith 
and pious pride to thunder against great Nineveh. But 
this strange man received the order silently, and silently 
evaded it. He did not hang his head and object, like 
poor, crushed Moses, when the hot patriotism of his youth 
had been cooled into apathy by exile, family ties, and 
forty years' intercourse with Midianitish bullocks. Jonah 
received the divine command quietly, turned his back 
upon it and upon Nineveh, fled to the seaport Joppa, and 
sailed in a ship for distant Tarshish. 

So imperfect was his inspiration at this time that he 
thought the hand of the God that he served could not 
reach him on a foreign sea. 

They got into blue water ; and such was his confidence, 
that he told the ship's company that he was flying from 
the tutelary God of Palestine. His hearers, no more en- 
lightened than himself, received his communication with 
no misgivings. 

But presently a mighty tempest from the Lord fell upon 
the sea, and the ship was in mortal danger. The mari- 
ners were terrified, and cried every man to his God, and 
not trusting too much to that, threw the cargo overboard. 
But there was one man who did not share their appre- 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 27 

hensions. He went quietly to sleep ; and neither the 
roaring sea, the whistling wind, nor the poor, creaking, 
laboring ship disturbed him. And of all the people 
whose lives were in such peril, who was this one calm 
sleeper ? 

It was Jonah. 

But the shipmaster came to him, and shook him, and 
insisted on his calling on his God. But, lo ! the peril 
increased ; and from the suddenness and violence of the 
storm, they began to suspect the anger of the gods against 
some person in that doomed vessel. So they cast lots to 
learn who was the culprit, and the lot fell on Jonah. 
Then they questioned as to his country and occupation, 
hoping, somehow or other, to gather how he had offended 
Heaven. 

Then Jonah, who now realized his folly and the narrow 
views he had taken of Him who is omnipresent and al- 
mighty, replied, " I am an Hebrew ; and I fear the Lord, 
the God of heaven, who hath made the sea and the dry 
land." 

Then the quaking mariners remembered he had told 
them he was flying from his God ; and now, behold ! that 
God, by his own confession, was not a local divinity, but 
the creator of sea and land. 

Connecting the new revelation with the sudden tempest 
and their increasing peril, the men were in mortal fear, 



28 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

and put a terrible question to Jonah, " What shall we do 
to you to save our own lives ? " 

Then Jonah, faulty as his character was, shone out like 
the sun. No shirking; no craven subterfuges. He looked 
them in the face and said, — 

"What you must do is, lay hold on me, and cast me 
into the sea, so shall the sea be calm to you ; for I know 
that for my sake this great tempest is upon you." 

Thus did Jonah show himself a prophet and a man. 

Though terror-stricken, murderous eyes glared on him, 
and the fearful sea yawned and raged for him, he was so 
true and so just that he delivered his own doom unflinch- 
ingly. 

Nobility begets nobility; and the partners of his peril 
could not bear to sacrifice a man in whom they saw no 
evil, but on the contrary, justice, heroism, and self-sacri- 
fice. The poor, honest fellows said, " Anything but that ; " 
and chose rather to be wrecked on shore. Their ship, 
after all, was but a galley lightened of its cargo ; so they 
got out their oars, and made a gallant effort to row their 
trireme ashore, and there leave her bones, but save their 
own lives and that self-sacrificing hero. This was not to 
be. Sixty hands laboring at those oars could not prevail 
against the one hand that hurled the raging sea at that 
laboring galley and drove her from the land. 

Then these doomed men resigned themselves to the will 




Jonah cast into the Sea. 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 29 

of Jonah's God. They cried to him most pathetically, 
" We beseech thee, Lord, we beseech thee, let us not 
perish for this man's life." And on the other hand, they 
begged that if Jonah was innocent his blood might not 
be laid on them, since they had done all they could to 
learn the divine will. And when they had so prayed, 
they took up Jonah, and cast him into the sea. 

No doubt, as that pale but unflinching face went down 
without a cry or murmur, they looked on a while with 
horror and misgiving ; but not for long : the sea subsided 
as if by magic. The waves were calmed ; the wind abated ; 
the vessel was saved. The rescued mariners worshipped 
the God of Jonah. 

To his late companions Jonah was lost forever. But 
God chastises his rebellious servants, not destroys them. 
Some monster of the deep was sent to that ship's side, 
and swallowed up Jonah as he sank. 

It was a terrible punishment. Think of it ! For all 
these things are skimmed so superficially that they never 
really come home to the mind, least of all to the mind 
that is bent on preaching doctrines and not on compre- 
hending facts. The man found himself in a place dark 
as pitch. . . . After the first shock of utter amazement, 
the sliminess, the smell, . . . must have told him where 
he was. Oh, then conceive his horror ! So he was not 
to die in the sea and there an end ; but to lie in the 



30 THE STOKY OF JONAH. 

belly of a great fish till he rotted away ; or to be brought 
up within range of the creature's teeth, and gnawed away 
piecemeal, and digested in fragments. 

Take my word for it, the poor wretch passed many 
hours of agony, expecting a slow death of torment, and 
would have given the world to be vomited into the ra- 
ging sea and perish by drowning, — a mild and common 
death. 

But as the hours rolled on, and death came no nearer, 
he began to hope a little, and to repent more and more. 
The man was soon crushed into that state of self-abase- 
ment and penitence out of which a forgiving God often 
raises his faulty servants to great honor and happiness. 
He prayed to God out of the fish's belly, and said, — 

I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and 
he heard me ; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou 
heardest my voice. 

For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of 
the seas ; and the floods compassed me about : all thy bil- 
lows and thy waves passed over me. 

Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look 
again toward thy holy temple. 

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul : the 
depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped 
about my head. 

I went down to the bottoms of the mountains ; the 
earth with her bars teas about me for ever : yet hast 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 31 

thou brought up my life from corruption, Lord my 
God. 

When my soul fainted within me I remembered the 
Lord : and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy 
temple. 

They that observe lying vanities forsake their own 
mercy. 

But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanks- 
giving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is 
of the Lord. 

And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out 
Jonah upon the dry land. 

Who was now the happiest man in all the world ? 
Why, — this forgiven sinner ; this punished, humbled, re- 
warded rebel. 

To him life was ten times sweeter ; the sunshine, the 
shelly beach, the purple sea with its myriad dimples and 
prismatic hues, ten times more lovely than to other men. 

Lazarus was happy returning from the grave to his 
beloved Master, and his darling sisters that wept on his 
neck for joy. 

Happy was the widow's only son, whom the Master, 
mighty yet tender, delivered with his own hand from 
his coffin to his bereaved mother, wild with amazement 
and maternal love. But both these men came back from 
the neutral state of mere unconsciousness to daylight 
and the joys of life. 



32 THE STOKY OF JONAH. 

Not so Jonah. He had been buried alive, and came 
back from the sickening horror of a living tomb, from 
a darkness and death that he felt, to the warm, bright 
sunshine, the glittering sand painted with radiant shells, 
the purple sea smiling myriad dimples, and rainbowed 
with prismatic hues. 

Whilst he gazed at these things with a rapture they 
had never before created in him, and poured out his 
soul in gratitude, there came to him once more the still, 
small voice of his Master, clear, silvery, dispassionate, 
and divinely beautiful. 

" Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto 
it the preaching that I bid thee." 

Jonah now obeyed with alacrity, and went to Nineveh, 
strong in his divine commission. 

Nineveh having perished about two centuries before 
Herodotus visited the Tigris, we have no better authority 
as to its size and population than the words of the 
Book of Jonah. We may, however, rely on the uni- 
versal tradition that it was a city of vast size and mag- 
nificence, and three days' journey in circuit by Jewish 
computation, or four hundred eighty Greek stadia, which 
two measurements agree, being sixty English miles. * 

It was a brilliant and luxurious city, at the head of 
the world in general magnificence and in the fine arts. 

* Sec final article, Part V., "Jonah in Nineveh." 






A STUDY OF JONAH. 33 

A rude Hebrew seer came from a country inferior in 
every mental quality but knowledge of God, and threat- 
ened this magnificent city with destruction in forty 
days, if the people did not repent of their sins, and turn 
to the true God. 

The thing to be expected was that the townspeople 
would laugh at him for a day or two, and then drag 
him through their gutters, or whip him through the 
streets with his prophecy pinned to his back in cunei- 
form letters. 

But Jonah, inspired by God, and being, so to speak, 
a prophet raised from the dead to do a great work, 
preached with supernatural power, and bowed these As- 
syrian hearts from the throne to the cabin. The King 
of Nineveh, the greatest monarch of the day, rose up 
from his throne at the preaching of Jonah, laid his 
royal robe in the dust, and sat on the ground in sack- 
cloth and ashes, a picture of lowly penitence, and an 
example which all his people followed. They fasted, 
not by halves, but to the confines of torture. They 
tasted neither food nor drink, and they kept food and 
drink from their herds, their flocks, and their beasts of 
burden. They covered themselves and their cattle with 
sackcloth. They abstained from the sins that Jonah had 
denounced, and cried for mercy to the God of this Boa- 
nerges. Then God saw, pardoned, and spared. 



3i THE STORY OF JONAH. 

Here was a triumph for Jonah, — alone, and with no 
human help, he had terrified and converted the greatest 
city in the world. Even egotism if humanized by be- 
nevolence could have found gratification in this. But 
poor Jonah was all egotism. A witty Frenchman has 
defined an egotist as a character who will burn down 
another man's house to cook himself two eggs. Jonah 
was quite up to the mark of this definition. He would 
have burned down a populous and penitent city to en- 
joy his one egg^ — the amour propre of a seer. 

He was sore displeased, and complained to the Lord. 
He even said — though I cannot say I quite believe him 
— tli at this was the only reason why he had fled to Tar- 
shish. # He knew his prophecy would prove an empty 
menace ; for said he, " I know that thou art a gracious 
God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, 
and repentest thee of the evil. I wish I was dead." 

Now, if any of us had been allowed to speak for God, 
we should have come down on this egotist like a sledge- 
hammer. 

What ! do you cast in God's teeth that quality by 
which you alone have yourself escaped destruction ? Re- 
turn, then, to the belly of that shark, and there, in the 

* Since it is apparent that Jonah was a person of some wealth, we 
may suppose that in going to Tarshish he had also a commercial pro- 
ject in mind. 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 35 

darkness of your eyes, let light visit your soul blinded 
by egotism. 

Come, now, shall penitent Jonah and penitent Nin- 
eveh be destroyed for their repented sins, or shall both 
be saved, and God be consistent, though man, Jonah in- 
cluded, is not ? 

But God never talks like that. He is better than man 
at man's best. Man forgives, but remembers, and some- 
times even alludes. God, when he forgives, obliterates. 
It is so throughout the sacred books ; and although neither 
the Hebrew writers nor any other writers can compre- 
hend or describe the infinite God, yet they all reveal 
this fragment of his infinite nature with a consistency 
that bears the stamp of truth, and excludes the idea of 
invention. 

When Jonah stood by the seaside, saved from death, 
God did not say to him, " See what comes of resisting 
my will ! " He obliterated what he had forgiven, and 
merely repeated his command about Nineveh without an 
unkind word. And now that this wayward servant re- 
proached him with his weakness in forgiving penitent 
Chaldeans, he only said to him, with more than mater- 
nal sweetness, " Doest thou well to be angry ? " This 
did not melt the angry Jonah. He turned his back on 
the city, which he hated for not fulfilling his prediction 
punctually. He went out into the fields, and sat down 



36 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

to see whether God would really be so cruel as to mor- 
tify Jonah, and save six hundred thousand people, not 
one of whom was Jonah. 

God pitied his servant exposed to the midday heat, 
and. prepared a gourd to comfort his aching head, and 
afterward instruct his heart. 

Then Jonah enjoyed great happiness. All the day he 
looked upon a wonder of nature. A lovely gourd came 
up from the ground, growing slowly but perceptibly, 
and reared and expanded its huge, succulent leaves, till 
they formed a thick canopy over the head of the favored 
prophet. 

Then Jonah rejoiced in the impenetrable shade of this 
lovely plant, and began to be half-reconciled to the pro- 
longed existence of Nineveh. 

Then the gourd entered on its second office. The Al- 
mighty had planted a worm in the gourd, and the worm 
was enabled to destroy it as rapidly as it had grown. 

Then did the sun and the hot wind beat on Jonah's 
head ; and he cried once more, as our foolish women do 
when things go wrong, — 

"I wish I was dead." 

Then God said to Jonah tenderly, " Doest thou well to 
be angry ? " 

Ungracious Jonah replied roughly, "I do well to be 
angry, even unto death," 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 37 

Then came the still, small voice, sweet yet clear, gentle 
yet mighty and penetrating, which no patriarch but Jonah 
ever resisted so long ; and even he must yield to it at last. 

" Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the Which 
thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow ; which 
came up in a night, and perished in a night. And should 
not I spare Nineveh, that great city,' wherein are more 
than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern be- 
tween their right hand and their left ; and also much 
cattle ? " 

Now, if the reader of Jonah is curious to know whether 
he left Nineveh as great an egotist as he entered it, I 
can only give him one man's opinion, but it is not a 
hasty one. In the first place, the Omniscient is not to 
be defeated ; why should Jonah's egotism resist him to 
the end, any more than Jonah's flight baffled him ? . . . 

Prima facie, the Almighty must conquer the heart of 
Jonah, since he knows the way to every heart. 

Starting from this safe position, I ask myself why so 
faulty a man as Jonah was so honored ? Clearly it was 
not because of his rebellious spirit, nor his egotism, but 
in spite of them. 

Probably he was a man of pure life and morals ; cer- 
tainly he was the soul of truth. Why should not the 
God of truth select as a vehicle of prophecy the brave, 
truthful man, who, facing desperate men with the sea 



38 THE STOKY OF JONAH. 

raging on him at his back, could say, "The truth is, 
you must take me up, and fling me into the sea ; for 
with my just execution the storm will abate." 

Jonah did not write the book, but he must have com- 
municated the facts and the main particulars of the dia- 
logue. 

Now, no unconverted egotist tells a tale so fairly through- 
out, and the concluding dialogue so thoroughly against 
himself, as it is done in this book. You read this dialogue 
between God and a man, and the writer is a man. A man 
yourself, you are shocked at the man, and you bless God. 

Moreover, he has given God the last word and the best. 
Now, no unconverted egotist ever did that, nor ever will. 
The unconverted egotist is to be found in a thousand auto- 
biographies. Catch him giving an opponent the last word, 
or the best. 

I have little doubt, therefore, that Jonah went home a 
converted egotist, and that when he came to think quietly 
over it all, he yielded to divine instruction, and that his 
character kept improving to the last day of his life. 

Of course I reject the conventional theory that Jonah, 
being a prophet, had no personal weakness under his skin, 
and wished penitent Nineveh to be destroyed only because 
he feared for his own nation if it was left standing. If he 
foresaw the Captivity at all, he must have known that the 
danger was to be from Babylon, after Nineveh had been 
centuries extinct. 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 39 

Long after Jonah, Nahum threatened Nineveh, but did 
not fear it. 

Those skimmers forget that if Jonah was faultless, God 
must have been imperfect, since God and he were in direct 
opposition ; and that not once, but twice. The Book of 
Jonah is generally underrated. One reason is, it is judged 
by commentators who have never tried to tell an immortal 
story ; so they underrate a man immeasurably their supe- 
rior, since the able narrator is above the able commentator, 
and high as heaven above the conventional commentator, 
who is mad after types, and who follows his predecessors, 
who follow theirs, u ut anser trahit anserem." 

The truth is, that " Jonah " is the most beautiful story 
ever written in so small a compass. 

Now, in writing it is condensation that declares the 
master ; verbosity and garrulity have their day, but only 
hot-pressed narrative lives forever. The Book of Jonah is 
in forty-eight verses, or one thousand three hundred and 
twenty-eight English words. 

Now, take one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight 
words in our current narratives, how far do they carry 
you ? Why, ten to one you get to nothing at all but 
chatter, chatter, chatter. Even in those close models, 
" Robinson Crusoe, 7 ' " The Vicar of Wakefield," " Candide," 
" Kasselas," one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight 
words do not carry the reader far ; yet in the one thou- 



40 



THE STORY OF JONAH. 



sand three hundred and twenty-eight words of Jonah you 
have a wealth of incident, and all the dialogue needed to 
carry on the grand and varied action. You have also 
character, not stationary, but growing, just as Jonah grew, 
and a plot that would bear volumes, yet worked out with- 
out haste or crudity in one thousand three hundred and 
twenty-eight words. 

Then, there is another thing. Only the great artists of 
the pen hit upon the perfect proportions of dialogue and 
narrative. With nineteen story-tellers out of twenty, there 
is a weary excess of dialogue. Nor are all the sacred 
narratives so nicely proportioned as Jonah. In Job the 
narrative is so short as to be crude and uninteresting com- 
pared with the events handled ; and the dialogue is exces- 
sive, and in some places false, since similar sentiments and 
even similar words are given to different speakers. In the 
Apocrypha, Judith and Tobit are literally massacred by 
verbosity and bungling; not so, however, in Susanna and 
the Elders — that is a masterpiece as far as it goes. 

To my mind, speaking merely as an artist, the Acts of 
the Apostles eclipses all human narratives. 

"Stellas exortus uti JEtherius sol;" 



and in the Old Testament, Genesis, Samuel, Jonah, and 
Ruth stand pre-eminent, and Jonah above sweet Ruth by 
the greater weight of the facts, and the introduction of 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 41 

the Deity. And oh, the blindness of conventional critics, 
groping Hebrew records, not for pearls of fact, but pebbles 
of dogma ! They have failed to observe that the God of 
Jonah is the God of the New Testament. Yet it is so ; 
and this great book connects the two Bibles, instead of 
contrasting them and sore perplexing every honest mind 
with a changeable Deity. 

]STo doubt the God of the New Testament can be found, 
or heavenly glimpses of him, in the Hebrew prophets. 
But how about the historians ? The truculent writers of 
Joshua, Judges, and Samuel have surely now and then 
colored the unchangeable God from their own minds and 
their own state of civilization. 

The Book of Jonah is not a book of prophecy, but just 
as much a history as Samuel ; yet in the history of Jonah, 
written long before Isaiah, God is the God of the New 
Testament, — the God we all hope to find in this world and 
the next. 

Were there no other reason, every Christian may well 
cling to the Book of Jonah. As to the leading miracle, 
which staggers some people who receive other miracles, 
these men are surely inconsistent. There can be no scale 
of the miraculous. To infinite power it is no easier to 
pick up a pin than to stop all the planets in their courses 
for a time and then send them on again. 

Say there never was a miracle and never will be, and 



42 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

I differ, but cannot confute you. Deny the creation and 
the possibility of a re-creation or resurrection ; call David 
a fool for saying, " It is he that hath made us, and not 
we ourselves," and ... a wise man for suggesting that, 
on the contrary, molecules created themselves without a 
miracle, and we made ourselves out of molecules without 
a miracle — and although your theory contradicts experi- 
ence as much, and staggers credulity more, than any mira- 
cle that has ever been ascribed by Christians or Jews to 
infinite power, I admit it is consistent, though droll. 

But once grant the creation of a hundred thousand 
suns and a million planets, though we never in our 
short span saw one created; grant the creation of men, 
lions, fleas, and sea-anemones, though all such creations 
are contrary to our experience ; and it is a little too 
childish to draw back and say that our Creator and re- 
Creator is only the Lord of flesh, and that fish are be- 
yond his control. 

Clearly, the infinite power can create a new fish in 
Jewish waters, or despatch an old fish . . . from the 
Pacific to the shores of Palestine. 

Now, to go from power to wisdom, is this miracle a 
childish one ? Does it smack of human invention ? 

What were the objects to be gained by it ? A rebel- 
lious servant was to be crushed into submission, yet not 
destroyed. He was to feel the brief agony of death by 



A STUDY OF JONAH. 43 

drowning, then to be laid in a horrible dark prison till 
he repented, then to be restored to the world in a fit 
state of mind and body to take a long journey, and 
threaten the greatest city in the world. 

Tackle all those difficulties, effect all these just and 
wise objects, invent your own miracle, and perhaps, 
when you compare it with Jonah's, you will think very 
highly of the latter, and not so highly of the noble 
army of skimmers, who have discredited and sneered at 
a record they have never tried hard to comprehend. 

" Facile juclicat qui pauca considerate 



PART III. 
THE BOOK OF JONAH. 



o 

h 
o 

*d 

> 

o 




THE BOOK OF JONAH. 



CHAPTER I. 

1 Jonah, sent to Nineveh, fleeth to Tarshish. 4 He is bewrayed by a tempest, 11 
thrown into the sea, 17 and swallowed by a fish. 

Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of 
Amittai, saying, 

2 Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against 
it ; for their wickedness is come up before me.* 

3 But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the 
presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa; and he 
found a ship going to Tarshish : so he paid the fare 
thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tar- 
shish from the presence of the Lord.| 

4 If But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, 
and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the 
ship was like to be broken. 

5 Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man 
unto his god, and cast forth the wares that mere in the 
ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was 
gone down into the sides of the ship ; and he lay, and was 
fast asleep. 

* See Note 2 at close of this article, t See Note 3. 

47 



48 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

6 So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, 
What meanest thou, sleeper ? arise, call upon thy God, 
if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not. 

7 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let 
ns cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is 
upon ns. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. 

8 Then said they unto him, Tell us, we pray thee, for 
whose cause this evil is upon us; What is thine occupa- 
tion ? and whence comest thou ? what is thy country ? and 
of what people art thou ? 

9 And he said unto them, I am a Hebrew ; and I fear 
the Lord, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea 
and the dry land, 

10 Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said unto 
him, Why hast thou done this ? For the men knew that 
he fled from the presence of the Lord, because he had told 
them. 

11 IT Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto 
thee, that .the sea may be calm unto us ? for the sea 
wrought, and was tempestuous. 

12 And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me 
forth into the sea ; so shall the sea be calm unto you : for 
I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. 

13 Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the 
land ; but they could not : for the sea wrought, and was 
tempestuous against them. 

14 Wherefore they cried unto the Lord, and said. We 
beseech thee, Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish 
for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood ; 
for thou, Lord, hast done as it pleased thee. 



THE BOOK OF JONAH. 49 

15 So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the 
sea : and the sea ceased from her raging. 

16 Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and of- 
fered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows. 

17 IT Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swal- 
low up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish 
three days and three nights. 

CHAPTER 2. 

1 The prayer of Jonah. 10 He is delivered from the fish. 

Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the 
fish's belly, 

2 And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto 
the Lord, and he heard me ; out of the belly of hell cried 
I, and thou heardest my voice. 

3 For thou haclst cast me into the deep, in the midst of 
the seas ; and the floods compassed me about : all thy bil- 
lows and thy waves passed over me. 

4 Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight ; yet I will 
look again toward thy holy temple. 

5 The waters compassed me about, even to the soul : 
the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped 
about my head. 

6 I went down to the bottoms of the mountains ; the 
earth with her bars was about me for ever : yet hast thou 
brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. 

7 When my soul fainted within me I remembered the 
Lord : and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy 
temple. 



50 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

8 They that observe lying vanities forsake their own 
mercy. 

9 But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanks- 
giving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of 
the Lord. 

10 IT And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited 
out Jonah upon the dry land, 

CHAPTER 3. 

1 Jonah, sent again, pre ache th to the Ninevites. 5 Upon their repentance, 

10 God repenteth. 

And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second 
time, saying, 

2 Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach 
unto it the preaching that I bid thee. 

3 So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to 
the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding 
great city of three days' journey. 

4 And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's jour- 
ney, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh 
shall be overthrown. 

5 IT So the people of Nineveh believed God, and pro- 
claimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of 
them even to the least of them.* 

6 For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he 
arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and 
covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 

7 And he caused it to be proclaimed and published 

* See Note 4. 



THE BOOK OF JONAH. 51 

through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, 
saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any 
thing : let them not feed, nor drink water : 

8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and 
cry mightily unto God : yea, let them turn every one from 
his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. 

9 Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn 
away from his fierce anger, that we perish not ? 

10 IT And God saw their works, that they turned irom 
their evil way ; and God repented of the evil, that he had 
said that he would do unto them ; and he did it not. 

CHAPTER 4. 

1 Jonah, repining at God's mercy, 4 is reproved by the type of a gourd. 

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very 
angry. 

2 And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, 
Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my 
country ? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish : for I 
knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to 
anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the 
evil. 

3 Therefore now, Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life 
from me ; for it is better for me to die than to live. 

4 IT Then said the Lord, Doest thou well to be angry ? 

5 So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east 
side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under 
it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of 
the city. 



52 THE STOI1Y OF JONAH. 

6 And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to 
come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his 
head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceed- 
ing glad of the gourd.* 

7 But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the 
next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. 

8 And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God 
prepared a vehement east wind ; and the sun beat upon the 
head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to 
die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. 

9 And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry 
for the gourd ? And he said, I do well to be angry, even 
unto death. 

10 Then said the Lord, thou hast had pity on the 
gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither mad- 
est it grow ; which came up in a night, and perished in a 
night :. 

11 And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, 
wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that can- 
not discern between their right hand and their left hand ; 
and also much cattle ? f 



[Note 1.] 

Note to FRONTISPIECE QF tiik Book of Jonaii. — The mound 
of Khorsabad is situated about fourteen miles north-east of Mosul, 
on the left bank of the little river Khauser, which empties into the 
Tigris nearly opposite Mosul, dividing the walled portion of the city 

* See Note o. t See Note (5. ' : 



THfi BOOK OF JOKAH. 53 

of Nineveh into two nearly equal parts. The city was built by 
Sargon. It affords the best opportunity for the study of the archi- 
tectural genius of Assyria. The city was laid out on a square, and 
had walls forty-six feet thick, and over a mile in length each way. 
The angles faced the four cardinal points. The outer wall was 
flanked by eight tall towers, and was erected on a mound of rubble. 

[Note 2.] 

The date of Jonah's prophecy, according to late authority, was 
about B.C. 825. 

[Note 3.] 

If Jonah were at his home at Gath-hepher (two miles from Sep- 
phariah, or Diocresarea, on the way to Tiberias from the port of 
Csesarea), he may have found no vessel at this nearer port, or, at 
least, none that would bear him whither he wushed to go, and there- 
fore continued on to the next important port. Being a prophet, he 
may have been at the school of prophets at Hebron when the word 
of the Lord came to him; and here Joppa was near at hand. 

" Tarshish, according to Herman Yon de Hart (a somewhat fan- 
ciful commentator), represents the kingdom of Lydia ; the ship, 
the Jewish republic, whose captain w r as the high-priest ; while the 
casting of Jonah into the sea symbolized the temporary captivity 
of Manasseh in Babylon." — McClintock and Strong. 

That there was anciently a considerable port bearing the name 
Tarshish there is no doubt, any more than there is now any doubt 
that there was a real city called Nineveh — which was long denied, 
until the explorations and excavations established the fact. The 
port has been held by some to have been at or near Carthage, while 
others have placed it at the north of the iEgean Sea or on the 
Adriatic ; but the latest conclusion of the students of ancient geog- 
raphy is that it was a port on the south-west coast of Spain, west of 
the Strait of Gibraltar — literally at the "end of the earth," as 
known in Jonah's time. 



54 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

[Note 4.] 

The Scripture does not say that Jonah spoke to the people of 
Nineveh in the name of Jehovah; neither is there any indication 
that he attempted to convert them to Judaism. The wickedness 
against which the word of the Lord was directed was not such in 
the Jewish code alone, but of a kind condemned even by Assyrian 
standards. The people of Nineveh may not have known that Jonah 
was sent to them by Jehovah, the God of Israel; but for some 
reason they received him as one having divine authority. — See 
Part V., " Jonah in Nineveh." 

[Note 5.] 

"The 'gourd' is supposed by some to have been the castor-oil 
plant, now commonly known in Syria and the Mediterranean coun- 
tries by the name Palma Christi. The original word, KIKAION, is 
the same as the Egyptian KIKI and Talmudic KIK, only with the 
Hebrew termination added. The plant is biennial, and usually 
grows to the height of from eight to ten feet. Its leaves resemble 
those of the Oriental plane-tree, but are larger, smoother, and of a 
deeper hue; they are broad, palmate, and serrated, and are divided 
into six or seven lobes. Henderson says that " only one leaf grows 
upon a branch ; but being large, sometimes measuring more than a 
foot, and spreading out in the shape of an open hand with the fin- 
gers extended, their collective shade affords an excellent shelter 
from the heat of the sun. It is of exceeding quick growth, and has 
been known in America to reach the height of thirteen feet in less 
than three months. When injured, it wilts and decays with great 
rapidity. 

''Other commentators are satisfied that the true gourd is really 
the plant meant; and they attribute the above opinion to the acci- 
dental similarity of the words in the modern Semitic dialects. 
They affirm that creepers of the gourd family, such as the climbing 
vine of rapid growth, arc commonly planted around arbors in th 



THE BOOK OF JONAH. 



55 



East, over which they form an agreeable shade." — CasselVs Illus- 
trated Family Bible. 

[Note 6.] 

The apocryphal book Tobit, and the " Antiquities," etc., of 
Josephus, refer to Jonah as historic. See Tobit xiv. 4-8 ; Jose- 
phus, Ant. x. 10+ ; also, 2 Esdras i. last 1. 

References by our Lord to Jonah: Matt. xii. 38-41 ; xvi. 4 ; Luke 
xi. 29-32. 



Jonah Sitting in his Booth. 



PART IV. 

i 

JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER, 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 



A NATURAL VIEW. # 

The well-known tendency of the Orientals to express 
themselves in allegory has led many readers of the Book 
of Jonah in the Old Testament Scriptures to regard the 
story as a fine example of this class of writing. 

When it was not known that an actual great city of 
Nineveh ever existed, it was not unreasonable to sup- 
pose that this book merely represented powers and ten- 
dencies of the human soul ; while those who did not 
think it possible that a man could be swallowed by any 
creature, and then, by regurgitation, opportunely arrive, 
not greatly harmed, on firm ground, might without ir- 
reverence regard the account of Jonah's mishap as a 
literary figure setting forth the common experience of 
some human faculty's failing to perform its office and 
becoming perverted ; or of a spiritual man, who, diso- 

* By George J. Varney, author of "The Story of Patriots' Day," 
J A Brief History of Maine," etc. 

59 



60 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

beying the divine command, almost certainly becomes 
overwhelmed in a flood of worldly matters, and finally 
is swallowed up in grossness, losing entirely, or tempo- 
rarily, his spiritual life.* 

Undoubtedly the story of Jonah does serve usefully 
in all these respects, and might in many more. Sweden- 
borg, the high-priest of symbolism, or correspondence, 
treats it as a genuine record of real natural experiences; 
but he says also that it is full of correspondences.! 
It may therefore be regarded as a very instructive por- 
tion of the sacred Scriptures ; and it is certain to be 
less lightly treated in the future than it has been for 
a long time past.t In its literary quality the Book of 
Jonah is not surpassed by any in the volume of which 
it forms a part. 

The story of the gourd may or may not be a fable 
or parable. It differs from common experience of the 
kind only in a shortening of the action, — which is ap- 
parent only, arising from the compression of the nar- 
rative. 

There are passages in the histories of nations and of 
eminent personages, especially those which are subjects 
of the sacred record, that furnish important instruction 
relating to the conduct of the spiritual as well as the nat- 

* See Note 1 at close of this article. f See Note 2. 

t See Note 3. 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 61 

ural life. There is a parallelism discoverable between the 
spiritual and the natural worlds, as might be expected 
from their having the same Creator ; and the sacred 
record appears to have been made largely for our instruc- 
tion through the correspondence of those two worlds or 
states of being. 

To persons who have an acquaintance with the results 
of modern research in those old Oriental countries to 
the degree common in our Sunday-schools, there is noth- 
ing in the Book of Jonah which appears either unnat- 
ural or impossible except the passage of the prophet into 
the stomach of a sea-monster, and his ejection from the 
same unharmed. Consequently in this article we need 
concern ourselves with nothing else. 

Does it appear unreasonable that a " whale " (or, lit- 
erally translated, sea-monster) should be in such position 
as to take the "man-overboard," while yet alive, into 
its capacious maw ? On the contrary, old whalers (sup- 
posing the creature to have been a whale) will all tell 
you that this animal is apt to mistake the commotion 
of the water in the wake of a vessel for the disturb- 
ance caused by schools of small fish, which form more 
or less of its food, inducing the hungry monster to make 
a charge with open mouth along its line. 

The habit of the pilot-fish and of sharks in following 
vessels is well known. Whales also sometimes show sim- 



62 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

ilar action. The following citation from the journal of 
a voyage in the Pacific Ocean in 1850 is to the point.* 

"November 13, ... A week ago to-day we passed several 
[sulphur-bottom whales], and during the afternoon it was discov- 
ered that one of them continued to follow us, and was becoming 
more familiar, keeping under the ship, and only coming out to 
breathe. His length is about eighty feet; his tail measures about 
twelve feet across; and in the calm, as we look down into the 
transparent water, we see him in all his huge proportions. 

"November 29th. The bark Kirkwood hove in sight, and bore 
down to speak us. When off a mile or two to leeward, our whale 
left us, and went to her, but returned soon after. 

" He showed great restlessness last night; and to-day, when we 
stood off to the outward tack, he kept close below us, and rose 
just under our quarter, and most commonly to windward, to blow. 
But whenever we stood toward the land he invariably hung back 
and showed discontent. This afternoon he left us. It is now 
twenty-four days since he attached himself to us, and during that 
time he has followed us as faithfully as a dog an emigrant's wagon. 
At first we abused him in every way our ingenuity could devise, 
to drive him off, lest he might do us some mischief; but save 
some scratches he received from our ship's coppering ... no 
damage was received by either of us by his close companionship. " 

Without question, in this instance, as in many others 
known, a huge sea-monster was in position to swallow a 
man, had one fallen overboard. Neither can there be 

* This is the record of an estimable physician of San Francisco, 
Dr. J. D. B. Stillman ; approved and published by Charles M. Scam- 
mon, Captain U. S. Revenue Marine, San Francisco, author of a 
monograph on marine mammals. 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 63 

any doubt that in case of the man-eating shark, and of 
some whales, in such vicinity, the man would have been 
swallowed. By any of these sharks now known to exist 
he would escape mangling only by the strength of his 
garments ; but would such have been the case with a 
man swallowed by a whale ? Light is thrown on both 
these points (i.e., the disposition of a whale to pick up 
a man when opportunity offers, and the degree of man- 
gling the victim would undergo) by an incident in the 
voyage of the bark Guy C. Goss of New Bedford, from 
Yokohama, Japan, to Tacoma, Wash., in July, 1891. 
During a terrific gale, one of the sailors, a Japanese, 
while on the topmast reefing a sail, lost his hold, and 
was thrown into the raging waves. The life-boat was 
put out, but the unfortunate man could not be found. 
They had turned back to the vessel, when a whale came 
up near by, and he was soon perceived to be writhing as 
if in distress. Suddenly the missing Jap was violently 
ejected from the whale's mouth, falling naturally upon 
the deck, — " saved by a miracle " was the language of 
the report. # He was carefully nursed, and was finally 
brought back to consciousness and health, though he had 
been severely jammed between the whale's jaws. He 
was dressed in an oilcloth suit, which had been recently 

* New Bedford Mercury, July 29, 1891. This is the trusted journal 
of the chief whaling-port in America. 



64 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

smeared with kerosene, and this probably rendered him 
an unpalatable morsel. 

The sulphur-bottom, the hump-back (which are of the 
whalebone species), the sperm (toothed), and all others 
of the huge gill-less amphibians (breathing through a nos- 
tril at the top of the head) which frequent the waters 
of the temperate and torrid zones, are now sometimes 
found in the Mediterranean Sea, and were still more bold 
and frequent there iii that early period before man had 
dared to attack any except a small one, and this under 
exceptionally favorable conditions. Undoubtedly any of 
these would take into its enormous mouth anything of 
fish or flesh which it encountered floating in a ship's 
wake. Would one swallow a man without mangling him ? 
As all of the whales mentioned, except the sperm, are 
without teeth, and swallow other objects without man- 
gling, the body of a man would similarly escape if he 
were swallowed. The reason why more of such incidents 
are not known to whalemen probably is that whales, like 
other animals, do not eat while they are fighting for life. 

It has been asserted of the bowhead, and less positively 
of the " right" whale, that these have too small a gullet 
to admit the passing of a man's body. The first of these 
is not found outside of the Arctic Ocean, and the other is 
rarely seen far southward of the Arctic Circle ; so that 
were their gullets as contracted as disputatious persons 



Jhi 




1 Oh 




JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTEll. 65 

assert, it would not affect conditions in the Mediterranean 
Sea. Yet let us inquire if the statement be true of any 
mature whale. 

The baleen whales (those which have the screen of 
whalebone in their mouths), when feeding, rush forward 
with jaws dispread into the schools or swarms of the 
small creatures which form their food. The fibrous slabs 
of whalebone, through which the water escapes, stop the 
multitude of small creatures, which are thus retained 
in the huge spoonlike or ladlelike cavity of the lower 
jaw. Of course, during this operation, the gullet must 
be entirely closed, else the creature's stomach would be 
filled with salt water ; but when this has been driven 
out of ,the mouth by the lifting of the tongue, and the 
jaws are shut closely, the gullet opens for swallowing 
the great mass of collected fishes. Now, how widely 
must the gullet open, how large must the aperture be, 
for the passage of the largest object which happened 
to be gathered up in the scoop ? 

Large quantities of codfish are sometimes found in 
the stomach of the humpback whale (scarcely more than 
half the size to which the " right " whale and the bow- 
head attain), and some in those of other whales. Among 
these are fish almost as large, and which would be as 
difficult to swallow, as a man ; neither does the whale 
swallow his prey one by one. Indeed, creatures meas- 



06 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

uring from fifteen to forty feet in circumference at the 
angle of the jaws do not lack throat space. No one 
ever heard of a whale that choked. 

The prey of the sperm whale is generally of large 
size, and of course liable to lacerations from the full- 
toothed lower jaw ; yet objects of comparatively small 
size, or those which make no violent struggles, may 



/$ 



A Sperm Whale Fighting His Captors. 

escape. No evidence is reported that the contents of 
the sperm whale's stomach have been subjected to crush- 
ing. The long, conical, ivory teeth, slightly curved in- 
ward and backward, are adapted only for seizing, hold- 
ing, and dividing bodies of large size ; and there are no 
teeth at all suitable for grinding, those of the upper 
jaw being rudimentary only. The principal food of this 
whale is " squid," a term applied by sailors to all kin. Is 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER, 67 

of cuttlefish, — the calamary, octopus, and others, — 
many of them of great size, but of soft flesh, and with- 
out bony skeleton. Dolphins also, horse-mackerel, and 
even sharks are found in the. vast stomach of the sperm 
whale. 

Mr. Joseph Swain, an old Nantucket whaleman of 
excellent reputation, has many times related the capture 
of a sperm whale, which in its death-struggle vomited 
up a piece of shark several feet long — a victim which 
could only have been overcome by considerable use of 
the jaws. 

This throwing up the contents of the stomach Avhen 
in distress is a common and well-known action of the 
w^hale. "The sperm-whale/ 7 says Starbuck, # "in the 
agony of his ' flurry/ often throws up immense pieces 
of undigested food, — pieces half as large as a whale- 
boat being frequently seen ; and these seem to be mere 
fragments of the immense marine monster to which they 
formerly belonged/ 7 

If the statement of a scientist rather than that of 
sailors is preferred, we have that, also, in a recent pub- 
lication by M. Joubin, a Frenchman, and a member of 
the Academy of Sciences, who describes an occurrence 
which had numerous witnesses during the scientific cruise 
of the Princess Alice in 1895. Near the Azores, a 
* "History of American Whale Fishery," p. 166. 



68 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

sperm whale, forty-four feet in length, was caught. 
Just before the great cetacean drew his last breath, he 
cast up several large cephalopods in excellent condition, 
which was accepted by the scientists as irrefragible evi- 
dence* that heavier and softer animals than man may be 
swallowed and yet preserved alive. This incident fur- 
nishes another illustration of life in queer and " impos- 
sible " conditions. 

Blumenbach, an early German zoologist, in his " Manual 
of Natural History/ 7 says that a horse has been found 
whole in the stomach of a sea-dog. Lacepede, in his 
" Histoire des Poissons" says that sea-dogs " have a lower 
jaw of nearly six feet in its semicircular extent," which 
" enables us to understand how they can swallow animals 
as large as or larger than ourselves." This creature is 
now known as the white shark (car clear las), which still 
abounds in Mediterranean waters. Instances are said to 
have been known of their attaining a length of thirty feet, 
and a weight of nearly ten thousand pounds. 

Bishop Pusey, in his " Introduction to the Book of Jo- 
nah," * and Professor C. E. Stowe, D.D.,f cite from Muller $ 
the following passage : " In 1758, in stormy weather, a 
sailor fell overboard from a frigate in the Mediterranean. 

• * " The Minor Prophets," Part III., p. 347. 
f Bibliotheca Sacra, X., 739-704. 
| " The System of Nature of Linneus," p. 750. 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 69 

A shark was close by, which, as he was swimming and 
crying for help, took him in his wide throat, so that he 
forthwith disappeared. Other sailors had leaped into the 
sloop [a special boat] to help their comrade while he was 
yet swimming. The captain had a gun, which stood on 
the deck, discharged at the fish, which struck it so that 
it cast out the sailor which it had in its throat, who was 
taken up alive and little injured, by the sloop which had 
come up to him. The fish was harpooned, taken upon the 
frigate, and dried. The captain made a present of it to 
the sailor who by God's providence had been so won- 
derfully preserved. The sailor went around Europe ex- 
hibiting it. He came to Franconia ; and it was publicly 
exhibited here in Erlangen, as also at Nurnberg and other 
places [in Germany]. The dried fish was demeated. It 
was twenty feet long, and, with expanded fins, nine feet 
wide, and weighed three thousand nine hundred and 
twenty-four pounds." 

A writer of the sixteenth century * on the fish of Mar- 
seilles says, " They of Nice attested to me that they had 
taken a fish of this sort [the white shark, carcharias~\ ap- 
proaching four thousand pounds weight, in whose body 
they had found a man whole. Those of Marseilles told 
something similar, — that they had once taken a lamia (so 

* Gyll de Gall, et Sat. nom. pise. Massil. c. 99, A.D. 1535. 



70 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

they still popularly call the carcharias), and found in it a 
man in a coat of mail." 

Such an incident is related to have occurred in A.D. 
1802^ on the authority of a Captain Brown, who found 
the body of a woman entire, with the exception of the 
head, within the stomach of a shark killed by him off 
Surinam (Dutch Guiana). * 

M. Brtinniche says f that during his residence at Mar- 
seilles, a white shark was taken near that city, fifteen 
feet long ; and that two years before, two, much larger, 
had been taken, in one of which had been found two 
tunnies, and a man quite dressed. The fish were injured, 
the man not at all. 

Pliny the younger, in the first century (50 A.D.), men- 
tions that the skeleton of a sea-monster forty feet in 
length, whose ribs were higher than those of an Indian 
elephant, " was brought from Joppa, a city of Judea, and 
exhibited in Home by M. Scaurus.t This, indeed, may 
have belonged to the very sea-rover which entertained 
Jonah. 

That sea-monsters were well known and feared a long 
period before the Christian era is evidenced by passages 
in the Psalms and in the Book of Job. "Am I a sea or a 
whale, that thou settest a watch over me ?" (Job vii. 12). 

* Buffon, ed. Sonnini, Poissons, TTT., p. 334, ed. of 1803. 

i Pise Mass., p. <*>. | Pliny, Hist. Nat., I., ix., chap. iv. 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 71 

That either the sperm whale or the sea-dog was a famil- 
iar creature to the dwellers on Syrian seacoasts is shown 
by the description of leviathan, as "his teeth are terrible 
round about." " He maketh the deep to boil like a pot " 
(Job xli.). 

A more plausible argument against the truth of the 
story is that, even if Jonah had been swallowed unhurt, 
he could not have lived an hour in the creature's stomach 
because of noxious gases ; whereas he is represented as 
having lived and retained the use of his mental faculties 
for three days * in that situation. 

We know, at least, that the human stomach has fur- 
nished a home wherein frogs, newts, and salamanders have 
thriven for months, and then been thrown up alive. Why 
may not a man have retained his vitality for three days 
in the stomach of a whale, the proportion between the 
contained and the container in both instances being the 
same ? Why may there not have been conditions from 
which a sufficient quantity of air might be present in a 
whale's stomach to sustain animal life ? The frogs and 
salamanders are, like man, under the necessity of coming 
above water for breath, and so is the whale ; and, as its 
mouth is often open when at the surface, the passage of 
air to the stomach seems unavoidable. That this is possi- 
ble, despite the denials of agnostics, is shown by a recent 

* See Note 4. 



72 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

instance, published and accepted as a demonstration of the 
reality of the story of Jonah (which he had previously dis- 
believed), by M. Henri de Parville,* of Paris, a gentle- 
man accustomed to weighing evidence, and of painstaking 
care in reaching conclusions. 

After mentioning that dissection has shown that whales 
of forty feet in length have stomachs of about seven 
feet in diameter, f he relates the experience of James 
Bartley, a member of the crew of the steam- whaler Star 
of the East. On Aug. 25, 1891, a large sperm whale 
was wounded by a bomb-lance from one of her boats. 
The monster in his fury rushed forward and seized the 
boat in his jaws, crushing the middle section to frag- 
ments, the sailors jumping into the sea in all directions. 
The stern of the boat was thrown upward, and Bartley, 
who was steersman, leaped out ; but the whale changed 
his position suddenly, so that the man alighted within 
his wide-open mouth. Bartley's shipmates saw the pon- 
derous jaws close about him, and gave him up as lost. 

In due time the whale was killed, and towed to the 
ship. The removal of the blubber occupied a day and 
a half. At last it occurred to the sailors to search the 
intestines of the whale for their lost shipmate. They 

♦ Scientific editor of that eminent periodical, the Journal do* , 
Dvhuts; March 14, 1896, pp. 539, 540, weekly edit ion. 
f See Note r>. 



"<m 




; 






JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 73 

cut open the vast stomach, and with great surprise 
beheld Bartley peacefully reclining within, unconscious, 
but still alive. He had been in the whale's stomach 
thirty-six hours. They drew him out, and laid him 
upon the deck, rubbed his limbs, and gave him brandy. 
His hands were purple, and he was smeared with the 
blood of his late host. In a short time he regained 
consciousness, but not his reason — being subject to the 
hallucination that he was being consumed in a fur- 
nace. (Though the temperature of whales is near 104° 
Fahr., the sailor's sensation of heat while in the whale's 
stomach would hardly have been so intense without 
an atmosx^here amply supplied with oxygen, however 
vaporous it might also have been.) The sufferer's ac- 
count of his experience was given by him as follows : 
" I remember very well," he said after his recovery, 
"from the moment that I jumped from the boat and 
felt my feet strike some soft substance. I looked up 
and saw a big-ribbed canopy of light pink and white 
descending over me, and the next moment I felt myself 
drawn downward feet first, and I realized that I was 
being swallowed by a whale. I was drawn lower and 
lower; a wall of flesh surrounded me and hemmed me 
in on every side, yet the pressure was not painful, and 
the flesh easily gave way like soft india-rubber before 
my slightest movement. 



74 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

" Suddenly I fpund myself in a sack much larger than 
my body, but completely dark. I felt about me ; and 
my hand came in contact with several fishes, some of 
which seemed to be still alive, for they squirmed in 
my fingers, and slipped back to my feet. Soon I felt a 
great pain in my head, and my breathing became more 
and more difficult. At the same time I felt a terrible 
heat ; it seemed to consume me, growing hotter and hot- 
ter. My eyes became coals of fire in my head, and I 
believed every moment that I was going to be broiled 
[not boiled~\ alive. The horrible thought that I was con- 
demned to perish in the belly of a whale tormented me 
beyond endurance, while at the same time the awful si- 
lence of the terrible prison weighed me down. I tried 
to rise, to move my arms and legs, to cry out. All 
action was now impossible, but my brain seemed abnor- 
mally clear ; and with a full comprehension of my awful 
fate, I finally lost all consciousness." 

The captain and crew of the Star of the East tes- 
tify to the facts of this occurrence, as narrated. James 
hartley was then about thirty -five years of age, a man 
of strong physique and great power of endurance. After 
the arrival of the steamer at Liverpool, Bartley had 
two or three recurrences of his hallucination of burn- 
ing up, and was sent to a hospital in London. Subse- 
quently he appears to have fully recovered his health. 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 75 

Again, it is assumed that for his story to be true, 
Jonah must have been in the full possession of his fac- 
ulties for all the three clays, and that he occupied the 
time with that fine composition known as his prayer. 
The book itself nowhere gives support to these assump- 
tions. Let us not read into the narrative more than 
is there, nor read it in any way different. 

The story is in the third person, as though a scribe 
'wrote it, perhaps from Jonah's recital. The book does 
not purport to be the composition of Jonah, only that 
certain expressions therein were made by him at certain 
periods of the several occurrences. Neither do we usu- 
ally expect, when an individual is giving an account of 
his acts and words on a certain critical occasion, that 
the repetition w T ill be without such development of the 
ideas and supplying of ellipses as may be necessary to 
complete the sense, thus rendering his acts and utterances 
intelligible to other persons. To Jonah and the people 
of his time his experience was a miracle ; to God there 
is no miracle. There can be no deviation from the 
primal, generic ways of action in the universe ; all that 
may appear so to man are merely the extreme notes in 
the divine harmony, — a few of the many possible re- 
sultants of natural forces opportunely and unusually com- 
bined. Some occurrences which were miracles to the 
people of past generations Ure in a degree comprehen- 



76 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

sible to us, though one miraculous element in them will 
always be beyond our knowledge, at least until death 
shall remove the veil of the physical and admit us to 
full spiritual sight ; this element being the convention of 
causes which God makes to be coincident with the need 
of their effect. But if we have gained a partial under- 
standing of any ancient miracles, we have also come to 
hold firmly the truths which they aided in establishing. 
Really, the passage called Jonah's "prayer" is rather 
his relation of his thanksgiving after deliverance ; and 
it contains only two lines of his prayer, made within 
the whale. There may have been no more uttered. If 
Jonah were conscious, and had possession of his in- 
tellectual faculties during his entombment, are we to 
suppose that all the three days would be devoted to 
framing his prayer ? Numerous reported experiences of 
drowning persons, rescued at the last moment and re- 
stored, show that a very brief time would be sufficient 
for the thoughts embraced in Jonah's prayer, and of 
the entire situation, including wicked Nineveh, to pass 
through his mind; indeed, a common expression of per- 
sons thus rescued is, " I thought of everything I had 
done in my life while going down that last time." Why 
should Jonah be required to spend three days in going 
through with that prayer? On the contrary, it is more 
in harmony with the book, and more reasonable to sup- 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTEU. 77 

pose, that Jonali had an experience similar to that of 
a drowning person, thought his thoughts very quickly 
and intensely, then lapsed into unconsciousness. 

The whale (if it were a whale) may have been thrown 
to shore by the violence of the storm-waves (as we know 
they sometimes are), perhaps having first been dashed on 
the sharp rocks, as a multitude of other whales have been ; 
and then, in his death agony (in accordance with the usual 
physiological action in the whale), he ejected the uncon- 
scious castaway upon the beach. 

So light an object as a man's body might have been 
driven higher and higher upon the shore by successive 
waves, as often happens in shipwrecks on a coast ; while 
the huge beast, rolling in the surge, floated away with 
the receding tide, to be stranded, perhaps, on some shoal. 

Jonah, reviving after a while in the pure air, would 
scarcely be expected to spend much time in looking about 
for the whale, and may not have discovered that his pre- 
server was dead. He finds that it is now the third day 
since he was cast into the deep ; and he seeks his home, 
and finally recovers from his unprecedented experience. 



[Note 1.] 
The allegorical treatment of the Book of Jonah, as relating to 
nations and peoples, is favorably illustrated by Kleinert's view : He 
sees in Jonah the nation with a prophetic call (Israel) in whom all 



78 THE STORY OF JONAH 

the nations of the earth shall be blessed. Nineveh represents the 
heathen world in its greatness and ignorance, the object of divine 
compassion. Israel seeks to evade its mission, and devotes itself to 
worldly pursuits (Jonah flees to Tarshish); but God punishes the 
nation by adversity (the storm), and by a captivity which threatens 
its very existence (Jonah swallowed by the sea-monster). When 
the nation cries to the Lord (Jonah's prayer), he delivers them 
(Jonah's escape from the monster); but their mission, still unac- 
complished, remains the same. Repentant Nineveh shows how the 
Lord is found of those that sought him not, while he stretches out 
his hands to a rebellious people. 

[Note 2.] 

Swedenborg's Summary Exposition of the Internal Sense of the 
Book of Jonah, "Apocalypse Explained," 431, 538. Chapter I.— 
Concerning the conversion of the nations, which are Nineveh ; that 
those who were of the Jewish nation were commanded to teach the 
Word to the nations round about, but that they would not, and that 
thus they alone kept the Word to themselves, 1-3 ; that knowledges 
began to perish with them, and that nevertheless they lived securely, 
4-G; that the nations perceived that the state of the church was 
perverted with them on account of the loss of knowledges with the 
Jews, and that they would not communicate to others beyond them- 
selves, 7-9; that they should reject those things which were of the 
Jewish nation, because they were falsified, in order that they might 
be saved, 10-13; that they should pray to the Lord for salvation, 
which was granted them, the falses from the Jewish nation being 
removed, 14-16. 

Chapter I, 17, and chapter II. — A prophecy concerning the com- 
bats of the Lord with the hells, and concerning his most grievous 
temptations then, and concerning his state then ; the three days and 
nights during which Jonah was in the bowels of the fish signify the 
whole duration of the combat with the hells, I., 17; II., 10. 



JONAH AND THE SEA-MONSTER. 79 

Chapter III. — That the nations, hearing from the Word of God 
concerning their sins that they were about to perish after repent- 
ance, converted themselves, and that they were heard by the Lord 
and saved, 1-10. 

Chapter IV. — That the Jewish nation was very wroth, because 
the nations were saved, 1-4; a representation of their wrath on that 
account, 5-11. 

Also, " Arcana Ccelestia," 1188, 1709, by same author. 

[Note 3.] 

"Beyond doubt also," says a devout scholar, remarkable for both 
comprehensive views and analytical acumen, "both the original 
record itself, and the allusions made to it by our Lord, assume that 
the matters therein contained are to be taken in their literal verity ; 
and not as fanciful representations or fabulous tales, but as actual 
facts in the divine procedure, did they carry the deep practical sig- 
nificance, alike for the present and the future, which is plainly 
attached to them in the Scriptures." 

[Note 4.] 

In such summary statements as those in the Book of Jonah, in 
the account of the entombment of Jesus, the Christ, and in other 
parts of the Scriptures, mention of time is not usually made exact. 
Our Lord was not in a morbific condition for three times twenty- 
four hours (that is, 72 hours), but he was wrapped in the cerements 
of the tomb in three days (that is, his entombment counted three di- 
urnal dates) ; yet the statement of the time as given in the Gospels 
has not been hypercritically dwelt upon by any sceptic who has ob- 
tained respectable listeners : no more should exactness in the dura- 
tion of Jonah's incarceration be insisted on. In ancient times there 
were neither watches nor clocks, while sun-dials, in any form, were 
rude, and the observations of the time of day inaccurate. 



80 THE STOliY OF JONAH. 

[Note 5.J 

The rorquals (whales having folds — Norwegian) are marked by 
a dorsal fin, and longitudinal folds of the skin under the mouth, 
throat, and stomach, — permitting great expansion, especially in the 
humpback variety, in which the folds extend posteriorly more than 
half the length of the body. In fact, this species of the Balanioptera 
(the rorquals) have several capacious sacs, which together consti- 
tute the stomach, not all of which perforin a strictly digestive func- 
tion. Thus, Sir William Turner, President of the British Koyal 
Society, in a paper read before that body in February, 1891, says, 
" The stomach of the lesser rorqual has five compartments, the first 
of which has not a digestive function." 

Bishop Jebb (" Sacred Literature," p. 178) holds that Jonalrs 
place of refuge was not in the stomach proper of a whale, but in 
a cavity in its throat answering to the upper compartment of the 
stomach, which, according to several naturalists, has the necessary 
capacity. Captain Scoresby, the scientific whaleman and author, 
asserts that it is sufficiently large to contain a merchant ship's jolly- 
boat full of men. This statement doubtless refers to the bowhead, 
the great whale of the Arctic Ocean, where the investigations of 
this reliable observer were chiefly made. 

Whaling authorities state that the sperm whale has been known 
to attain a length of ninety feet or more, and the humpback to sixty 
feet. 



PART V. 



JONAH IN NINEVEH. 



salillllllllliil: - ■■. ■ ." f~S 



.y 








'■Y-; 


■/ 




, X- 


(<j 


/■\ 


v / V v 




] 


■■ % ~* 





liii'ii :. :. . 1:11 . 1 

Sub-Deities of the Chaldeans. 
JONAH IN NINEVEH* 



In the discussion of the question of the historicity of 
the Book of Jonah, two objections, urged against its verity 
at various times from the days of Lucian until now, have 
had weight with many scholars who find no difficulty in 
accepting as true the Bible record of miracles generally. 
These objections are : (1) The seeming lack of a sufficient 
reason for the unique miracle of Jonah's preservation in a 
great fish; (2) The essential improbability of the instant, 

* By H. Clay Trumbull, D.D., editor of The Sunday School Times. 
First published in The Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. xi., Parti. 

83 



84 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

reverent heed of an entire people to the simple religious 
message of an unknown visitor from an enemy's country. 

A peculiarity of Bible miracles that differentiates them 
from all mere myths and fables and " lying wonders " of 
any age is their entire reasonableness as miracles ; their 
clear exhibit of supernaturalness without unnaturalness. 
When, for instance, God would bring his people out of 
Egypt with a mighty hand, he does not tell Moses to 
wave his rod above their heads in order that, after the 
fashion of stories in the "Arabian Nights," they should 
be transported through the air and set down in Canaan ; 
but he brings them on foot to the borders of Yam Suph, 
where he tells Moses to stretch out his rod over the sea, 
in order that its waters may divide and make a pathway 
for the Hebrews ; and again to stretch it out in order that 
the waters may return for the deluging of the Egyptians. 

So, again, the ten " strokes," or miraculous " plagues," 
wrought for the bringing of Pharaoh to release God's cap- 
tive people, are successive strokes at the gods of Egypt, 
beginning with a stroke at the popular river-god, and pass- 
ing on and up to a stroke at the royal sun-god in the 
heavens, and terminating with a stroke at the first-born, 
or priestly representative of the gods, in every household 
of Egypt, "from the first-born of Pharaoh that sitteth 
upon the throne, even unto the first-born of the maid- 
servant that is behind the mill ; and all the [consecrated] 



JONAH IN NINEVEH. 85 

first-born of cattle." The miraculous strokes are, in the 
light of later Egyptian disclosures, seen to be a reason- 
able, although a supernatural, exhibition of the supremacy 
of the God of the Hebrews over the boasted gods of 
Egypt, rather than a reasonless display of divine power. 

Similarly the miracles of the four Gospels differ from 
those of the Apocryphal Gospels in the simplicity of their 
reasonable supernaturalness, as contrasted with the irra- 
tional unnaturalness of their spurious imitations. In the 
one case, the miracle is a reasonable exercise of supernat- 
ural power for the increase of food, for the healing of 
disease, for the restoration of (natural) life, for the quiet- 
ing of the disturbed elements of nature. In the other 
case, the miracle is a silly marvel of making clay figures 
walk or fly, and of killing naughty boys with a word or a 
wish. 

Where, in the Old Testament or the New, except in the 
Book of Jonah, is there such a seemingly unnecessary 
miracle as the saving a man's life by having him swal- 
lowed in a fish, instead, say, of having the vessel that 
carried him driven back by contrary winds to the place 
of its starting ? Where else is there a story of the in- 
stant turning of a great multitude from self-seeking to 
God-seeking, by the words of a single strange speaker, 
without even the intervention of an obvious miracle in 
enforcement of the speaker's message, as at the time of 



86 



THE STORY OF JONAH. 



Belshazzar's feast, or at the Day of Pentecost ? Is it, 
indeed, to be wondered at, in this view of the case, that 
a writer like Professor Cheyne should say concerning 
the historicity of the Book of Jonah : " From a purely 
literary point of view it has been urged that 'the marks 
of a story [of an imaginary story] are as patent in the 
Book of Jonah as in any of the tales of the u Thousand 
and One Nights ; " ' " and again, that " the greatest of the 
improbabilities [in this case] is a moral one; can we con- 
ceive of a large heathen city being converted by an obscure 
foreign prophet ? " 

Just here it is well to ask if there is anything in the 
modern disclosures of Assyrian life and history that would 
seem to render the marvellous element in the story of 
Jonah more reasonable, and the marvellous effect of his 
preaching at Nineveh more explicable and natural. And 
it seems to me that certain well-known facts in these dis- 
closures have not been brought into their fair relations 
with reference to this question. 

Prominent among the divinities of ancient Assyria, as 
shown by the monuments, was Pagan, a creature part 
man and part fish. The divinity was in some instances 
represented as an upright figure, with the head of a fish 
above the head of a man, the open mouth of the fish form- 
ing a mitre as the man's sacred head-dress, and the feet of 
a man extending below the tail of the fish. In other cases, 



JONAH IN NINEVEH. 



87 



the body of a man was at right-angles to the conjoined 
body of a fish. Images of this fish-god have been found 
guarding the entrance to the palace and temple in the 
ruins of Nineveh, and they appear upon ancient Babylo- 
nian seals in a variety of 
forms. # The name Dagan 
is found in the cuneiform 
inscriptions at an early 
date. Tiglath-pileser I. 
mentions an ancient ruler 
of Assyria under the 
name of Ishme-Dagan, who 
preceded him by six hun- 
dred and forty-one years, 
which would indicate a 
period of about 1840 b.c. ; 
and another Ishme-Dagan, 
a Babylonian king, lived 
still earlier than the As- 
syrian ruler. 

That this fish-god Da- 
gan was an object of rev- 
erent worship in early Babylon and Assyria is clear from 
the monuments. Berosus, a Babylonian historian, writing 




Broken Figure of Man-fish. 



* See Layard's " Nineveh and its Remains," II., 353f. ; "Nineveh 
and Babylon," 292-295, 301f. 



88 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

in the fourth century before our era, records the early tra- 
ditions concerning the origin of this worship. According 
to the various fragments of Berosus preserved in later his- 
torical writers, the very beginning of civilization in Chaldea 
and Babylonia was under the direction of a personage, 
part man and part fish, who came up out of the sea. Ac- 
cording to the account of this tradition given from Berosus 
by Apollodorus, " the whole body of the animal was like 

that of a fish, and had under a 
fish's head another head, and 
also feet below, similar to those 
of a man, subjoined to the fish's 
tail. His voice, too, and lan- 
guage were articulate and hu- 
man; and a representation of 

him is preserved even to this 
The " Dagon " of Scripture. r 

day. This being used to con- 
verse with men in the daytime, but took no food at that 
season ; # and he gave them an insight into letters and 
sciences and every kind of art. He taught them to con- 
struct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and ex- 
plained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. 
He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and 
showed them how to collect fruits. In short, he instructed 

* See Book of Bel and the Dragon, in the Apocryphal Old Testament. 
— Ed. 




JONAH IN NINEVEH. 89 

them in everything which could tend to soften manners 
and humanize mankind. From that time, so universal 
were his instructions, nothing material has been added by 
way of improvement. When the sun set, it was the custom 
of this being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all 
night in the deep ; for he was amphibious." Berosus also 
records that from time to time, ages apart, other beings of 
like nature with this first great teacher came up out of the 
sea with fresh instructions for mankind ; and that each one 
of these avatars, or incarnations, marked a new epoch, and 
the supernatural messenger bore a new name. So it would 
seem to be clear that, in all those days of Israel's history 
within which the Book of Jonah can fairly be assigned, the 
people of Nineveh were believers in a divinity who from 
time to time sent messages to them by a personage who 
rose out of the sea, as part fish and part man.* This being 
so, is there not a perceptible reasonableness or logical 
consistency of movement in the narrated miracle of Jonah 
in the fish, and of the wonderful success of the fish-ejected 
Jonah as a preacher in the Assyrian capital ? 

What better heralding, as a divinely sent messenger to 
Nineveh, could Jonah have had, than to be thrown up out 
of the mouth of a great fish, in the presence of witnesses, 
say on the coast of Phoenicia, where the fish-god w r as a 
favorite object of worship ? Such an incident would have 
* See Note 1, at close of this article. 



90 THE STORY OF JONAH. 

inevitably aroused the mercurial nature of Oriental ob- 
servers, so that a multitude would be ready to follow the 
seemingly new avatar of the fish-god, proclaiming the 
story of his uprising from the sea, as he went on his 
mission to the city where the fish-god had its very centre 
of worship. And who would wonder that when it was 
heard in Nineveh that the new prophet among them had 
come from the very mouth of a fish in the sea to bring 
them a divinely sent warning, * all the people, "from the 
greatest of them even to the least of them," should be 
ready to heed the warning, and to take steps to avert 
the impending doom proclaimed by him.f 

In short, if the Book of Jonah is to be looked upon 
as a veritable history, it is clear, in the light of As- 
syrian records and Assyrian traditions, that there was 
a sound reason for having Jonah swallowed by a fish, 
in order to his coming up out of a fish; and that the 
recorded sudden and profound alarm of the people of 
an entire city at his warning was most natural, as a 
result of the coincidence of this miracle with their re- 
ligious beliefs and expectations. Hence these two stock 
arguments against the historicity of the Book of Jonah 

* See Note 2. 

t The Bible story of the repentance of a whole people, and of their 
signs of repentance at the call of their king, is entirely in accord with 
the historical records of Oriental peoples and sovereigns, in cases where 
the ruler was moved by fear or grief. 



JONAH IN NINEVEH. 



91 




Two Man-fish Priests. 



92 THE STORY- OF JONAH. 

no longer have the force that they have seemed to 
possess. 

There is another point in the record of Berosus that 
has a possible bearing on the story of Jonah at Nineveh. 
Berosus gives the name of the Assyrian fish-god as 
" Oannes," while he mentions the name " Odacon " as 
that of one of the avatars of Oannes. Now, as the 
name Dagan appears frequently in the Assyrian records 
from their earlier dates, and no trace has been found 
in them of the name "Oannes," or anything like it, the 
question suggests itself, Is there in this name, Oannes, 
any reference to Jonah as the supposed manifestation 
of the fish-god himself ? 

While " Oannes " is not the precise equivalent of the 
name " Jonah," it is a form that might naturally have 
been employed by Berosus while writing in Greek, if 
he desired to give an equivalent of " Jonah." And if 
it were a literal fact that a man called " Yonah " had 
come up out of the very mouth of a fish in the sea, 
claiming to be a messenger of the great God to the 
people of Nineveh, and had been accepted by king and 
people accordingly, is it not reasonable to suppose that 
Berosus, writing after that event, would connect the 
name Jonah with the primal divinity of Nineveh ? And 
is there not in these disclosures of the Assyrian monu- 
ments, and of the later Babylonian historian, incidental 



JONAH IN NINEVEH. 



93 



proof of the naturalness of the narrative of Jonah at 
Nineveh, whether that nar- 
rative be looked upon as 
a plain record of facts, or 
as an inspired story of 
what might have been 
facts ? 

It would certainly seem 
to be true that, if God de- 
sired to impress upon all 
the people of Nineveh the 
authenticity of a message 
from himself, while leav- 
ing to themselves the re- 
sponsibility of a personal 
choice as to obeying or dis- 
regarding his message, he 
could not have employed 
a fitter method than by 
sending that message to 
them in a way calculated 
to meet their most rever- 
ent and profound concep- 
tions of a divinely author- 
ized messenger.* And this divine concession, as it may 

* See Note 3. 




A God-fish (Oannes). 



94 THE STOKY OF JONAH. 

be called, to the needs, and aspirations of a people of 
limited religious training, would be in accordance with 
all that we know of God's way of working among men ; 
as shown, for example, in his meeting of Joseph in 
Egypt through the divining-cup, and of the Chaldeans 
through their searching of the stars. 

In addition to this trace of the name Jonah as con- 
nected with Assyria in the writings of Berosus, the 
preservation of that name at the ruins of Nineveh would 
seem to indicate or to confirm a historic basis for this 
connection. It has been customary to account for that 
name at that site by the carrying of it thither by the 
Muhammadahs in the Middle Ages. But how was it 
that the early Muhammadans accurately located' that 
site, which had been so utterly lost to human knowledge 
that when Xenophon's army passed the ruins of the 
capital of Assyria, a century before Berosus, no trace of 
the name or fame of Nineveh as Nineveh seemed to re- 
main there.* As soon, however, as modern discoverers 
unearthed the mound that had for long centuries — ■ per- 
haps from the days of Nineveh's destruction — been 
known by the name of Neby Yunas, they found beneath 
it the ruined palaces of kings of Nineveh. It is possible 
that the name " Yunas," t or " Jonah," at this site, was a 
survival of the tradition that a divinity of that name 
* Sec Note 4. f Jonas. 



JONAH IN NINEVEH. 95 

there appeared to the Ninevites, as indicated by Berosus. 
It is a well-known fact that the name of a local divin- 
ity adheres with wonderful persistency to its locality in 
the East. 



[Note 1.] 

The lion and the eagle, the forms which chiefly occupy the 
attention among the architectural remains of Nineveh and Babylon 
from their number and size, are conceptions of a later period than 
the man-fish forms — these belonging to the age of the founding of 
the empire. They are generally of less ambitious workmanship, 
and usually show imperfection from decay, and are obscured by 
the work of the later generations. The eagle, the lion, and the 
bull, being better suited to set forth the personal glory of the mon- 
arch, have been principally used in monumental decoration. The 
man-fish forms, on the contrary, rarely appear in works reared by a 
monarch, or to his memory, having an almost exclusively religious 
signification. Consideration of all such figures and their relative 
position shows that the religious sentiment of the people was closely 
bound up with them, even to a late period in the existence of Nin- 
eveh. — Ed. 

[Note 2.] 

It is not said in the Bible record that Jonah spoke in the name 
of Jehovah to the people of Nineveh, although it is said that it was 
the "word of Jehovah" which came to him as he was sent thither. 
(Jonah i. 1; hi. 1.) 

[Note 3.] 

A native fragment of the legend of Oannes from an Acca- 
dian work has been accidentally preserved in a bilingual reading- 



96 THE STOliY OF JONAH. 

book compiled for the use of Semitic students of Accadian, as 
follows : — 

" To the waters their god has returned ; into the house of his 
repose the protector has descended. 

The wicked weaves spells, but the sentient one grows not old. 

A wise people repeated his wisdom. 

The unwise and the slave [literally, person], the most valued 
of his master, forgot him. 

There was need of him, and he restored his decrees." (See 
Sayce's Origin and Growth of Religions, p. 131.) 

[Note 4.] 
See Anabasis, Book III., § 4. Herodotus, at an earlier date 
than Xenophon, speaks of the Tigris as " the river upon which 
the town of Nineveh formerly stood" (History, Book I., § 193); 
this was (say) a century and a half after the destruction of the 
capital of Assyria. The idea that Muhammadans or Christians 
were enabled by their instinct, or through a miraculous attainment 
of knowledge, a dozen centuries after that time, to locate in the 
desert the site of the city where Jonah preached, is more improb- 
able than anything in the Book of Jonah. 



NOT A BENE. 



The foregoing article does not embrace Dr. Trumbull's 
final words on the subject ; which, together with his notes 
and numerous references to authorities, are to be found 
in his little volume, " Light on the Story of Jonah," pub- 
lished by John D. Wattles & Co., Philadelphia. Price, 
20 cents. 






t 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS |d 



029 789 053 0, 



